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Welcome to the fre:ac developer blog. I will post status updates and other information about fre:ac development here.

Power to the people!

Written by Robert

Saturday, 21 December 2013 19:12

Er, PowerPC that is. This summer I bought two G4 PowerBooks to try and port fre:ac to it. I ported it to OS X Leopard, tested for and eliminated any byte order dependencies, allowing fre:ac to run on the PowerPC's big endian architecture, and finally polished some rough edges.

So dust off your old PowerMac and try the latest fre:ac snapshot for OS X. It's a universal binary working on Intel and PowerPC Macs alike. You'll need OS X Leopard on your PowerMac for it to work. No video downloader on PowerPC (and Leopard in general) though, sorry. It will probably be available in a future snapshot.

fre:ac development status update 11/2013

Written by Robert

Tuesday, 05 November 2013 19:59

I just finished implementing all features planned for the next fre:ac snapshot. The next two or three weeks will be used for stability testing and packaging so the release is expected to happen around mid November early December. Here's what you can expect from the next snapshot:

Several problems have been identified and fixed thanks to Coverity Scan. That's an online service offering free static source code analysis for Open Source projects. Coverity Scan originally found 123 issues in fre:ac's code. About one third of them were false positives, but 84 potential bugs that are fixed in the upcoming snapshot. A handful of those defects had a high possibility of crashing fre:ac during normal use. I'd definitely recommend Coverity Scan to every Open Source project. It's free and a great help in improving a project's code quality.

Getting rid of the X

Written by Robert

Saturday, 14 September 2013 19:12

It's been a while since the 20130430 snapshot release and even more since my last post here, so here's an update on fre:ac development.

I have been working several weeks to try and make fre:ac run on OS X without an X server. The screenshot to the right shows fre:ac running on Snow Leopard without XQuartz.

Making this work meant implementing the smooth Class Library window and graphics backends on top of Cocoa. This was a lot more work than porting the original Win32 code to Xlib and Cairo back then. The Cocoa API is just so much different from any other user interface API I've come across before. Because of that it sometimes was difficult to map smooth calls to Cocoa and vice versa.

However, I'm making good progress on this now and think about 75% of the work is done at this point. It seems save to say that native Cocoa support will be available in the next fre:ac snapshot.

fre:ac video tutorial at FindmySoft.com

Written by Robert

Friday, 02 March 2012 01:12

The folks at FindmySoft.com notified me that they made a Quick Look Video of fre:ac. The first part of it shows the menus while the second is actually a quick tutorial on how to rip and convert using fre:ac. I had a look and really liked it; the video is here. Scroll down a bit to get to the actual review with the video embedded at the right.

Large fonts support is coming finally

Written by Robert

Friday, 02 March 2012 00:46

Probably the single most requested feature still missing in fre:ac is support for large fonts. Current versions use the same small user interface font no matter what your font settings in Windows are, making it hard for many people to actually use the program. That era will be over soon!

The next snapshot will include support for large fonts and fre:ac will finally obey your font size settings. I worked really hard the last few months to make this happen. It was a challenging task most of the time and a frustrating one now and then, but I think it has now reached a state where it is save to announce an imminent release.

The plan is to release that snapshot in late March or early April. Shortly after that, there will be a 1.0.21 Beta release also including large fonts support.

New BonkEnc 1.1 snapshot released

Written by Robert

Tuesday, 27 July 2010 20:54

I released a new preview snapshot of BonkEnc 1.1 just a few minutes ago. This time the focus was on fixing bugs and stability issues. You will also notice that GUI responsiveness has improved greatly vs. the last snapshot.

The list of new features is quite short for this release. It basically introduces an album editing mode for the tag editor and adds ALAC decoding support.

The album editing mode makes it possible to edit tag fields simultaneously for all tracks of an album in the joblist. No need to set comments, cover art or other fields separately for each track anymore!

I think the snapshot is quite stable at least for basic conversion tasks, so feel free to download and try it.